Removing the violent students from school

Veronica, thirty-one, explains, "I did a lot of acting out when I was younger. There were social workers, psychiatrists. But no one ever asked what was going on with me. Basically they were putting labels on me, telling me what a terrible person I was. My acting out as a kid was related to the sexual abuse. I started a fire in the woods. I was in the fifth grade and I started skipping school. It seems as if social workers and such were always in my life, but I don't know what they were doing other than moving me around and stuff." Although running away and delinquency often cause additional problems for the child-victim they are ways of expressing her turmoil and attempts at exercising some type of control. (Dinsmore, 1991:27)

Many of the students who are the perpetrators of violence in school will be those who are experiencing violence at home. Students who have been violent are only too aware of the way violence can quickly become part of their identity, and explained how hard it is to be seen or even to see themselves in a different light:

Don't think about the person who committed the violence as a perpetrator, think of them as a person. Because what I've seen in schools is that when you did something really bad, you get punished for it, and that cloud hangs over your head. It's like a shroud of shame that you have to walk with. So a lot of the kids end up going with a life of walking on that road for the rest of their lives... They don't take time to look at them as a person and wonder - why did you do this? (Zane Holder)

The students the child welfare reporting policies are theoretically designed to protect said repeatedly that nobody asked why they were misbehaving. When the school clamps down firmly on their behaviour-behaviour that is perhaps one way to break silence about violence being done to them when other routes to talk directly and maintain control are so limited-they may have an added sense of injustice: others who hurt them get away with violence, but when they are violent, they immediately get into trouble.

Staff in an after-school leadership program which works with both perpetrators and victims of violence described the value of asking why a student is misbehaving, rather than only instituting punishments:

One of the kids was acting out in one of the programs, you know, sort of swearing, being a bit aggressive, and I pulled that kid out and just said "I've noticed that you're acting this way today, is there something that's going on with you?" You know, without judgment, just... I've noticed you've been a bit more direct today, a little more outspoken, something like that with, again, no judgment, and trying to get behind that. ...my initial feeling around it was like, excuse my French, but "Why is he acting like such a ---?" You know, like it's really hard for the lesson to go on, and he's really disruptive. I was feeling kind of angry, because as a staff member you feel responsible for the kids really taking in the lesson basically. So instead I pulled him aside at break, and I was just like "You know, what's up with you today?" and as it turned out, there was stuff going on. So it's a much more empathic way to communicate. (LOVE staff)